Corrective maintenance, reactive maintenance and run to failure get used as though they mean the same thing, and treating them as synonyms is how a maintenance function ends up unable to describe its own work. Corrective maintenance is fixing a fault you already know about. Reactive maintenance is fixing one that surprised you. Run to failure is a deliberate decision not to prevent a failure because preventing it costs more than it saves. Only one of the three is a problem, and a site that lumps them together cannot tell whether it is improving. This page separates them.
Corrective work can be planned, and usually should be
A fault found during a PM inspection is corrective work, and it is normally scheduled: the machine is stopped at a chosen moment with the part to hand. This is the good case, and it is the payoff for doing inspections at all. Counting it as reactive because it was not on the original schedule makes your numbers look worse than the function is.
Reactive work is the one to count
Reactive means nobody knew. On the worked example this site publishes, 240 work orders a month at 35% reactive is 84 jobs at 2.3 hours more each than the planned version: 193.2 hours and $9,273.60 a month. This is the share worth watching, and separating it from planned corrective work is what makes it meaningful.
Run to failure is a decision, not a confession
For assets that are cheap, held in spares and quick to swap, where the failure stops nothing and hurts nobody, running to failure is correct and preventing it is waste. What makes it legitimate is that it was written down against the asset, with the reason; what makes it negligence is that nobody ever decided.
Why the distinction changes what you buy
A site with high reactive work needs a schedule it can staff. A site with high planned corrective work is finding faults and fixing them, which is what an inspection programme is for. The same headline number, split two ways, points at opposite purchases.
Questions people ask about corrective maintenance
Is corrective maintenance the opposite of preventive?
Not exactly. Preventive is doing work to stop a failure; corrective is doing work because something is already wrong. The useful opposition is planned against unplanned, which cuts across both.
Should corrective jobs get their own priority?
Yes, and it should be set from consequence rather than from who asked. A written priority scale with three or four levels is enough; a free-text urgency field becomes noise within a month.
How do we reduce reactive work?
Find faults earlier, which means inspections that look for the things that actually fail on your plant, and then act on what they find. An inspection programme whose findings are never scheduled produces paperwork rather than reliability.